


A Life

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Cable and Deadpool, Deadpool (Comics), Deadpool - All Media Types
Genre: Baby Mutants, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Grocery Shopping, Kidfic, M/M, Wade being a Good Dad, because that's what I'm doing, i have slept 4 hours in 2 days, pretend the divorce never happened, what if we just pretended that a bunch of stuff that i didnt read also didn't happen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-23 16:37:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20011468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: A series of short Deadpool/Cable fics, in which the divorce never happens and Wade and Nate run away together to try to raise their daughter together in relative peace and safety. Slightly to the left of canon because seriously I don't care anymoreOr: Wade tries to go grocery shopping with baby Hope.It goes about as well as you'd expect.!!! IMPORTANT NOTICE!!! If you read this on a paid app, you have been swindled! It is originally hosted on archiveofourown.org and can be searched and read there FOR FREE!!!Please come visit the website and comment, and let me know if that is how you found me!





	1. Grocery Shopping

**Author's Note:**

> Hey what's up you all, I'm back on my shits after having no, shall we say, juice to work with these characters for years
> 
> Mostly I needed to do something silly and fluffy for Wade and Nate and Hope, so that's what this/these are probably going to be!

A man was walking down the cereal aisle of a grocery store, pushing a cart one-handed and mumbling softly under his breath.  
He was wearing a red sweat-shirt printed to emulate Spider-Man’s costume, and had a red and black baseball cap, the brim pulled down low in front to hide the upper half of his face. A large backpack, densely festooned with different X-Men themed pins, hung off one shoulder.

The man himself would have been almost nondescript—tall, on the lanky side of muscular—except for the thin line of skin of his neck showing between the collar of the sweatshirt and the back of the baseball cap was riddled and marred with angry-looking red lesions and pale, raised scar tissue.   
The hand that he was currently pushing the card with was the same way, as was the other, which he was using to pat the back of a baby-bjorn he had slung across his chest. The baby bjorn contained one infant, just shy of one year old, who was currently wearing what looked like a Spider-Man onesie and a crocheted hat shaped like a pair of Pikachu ears.   
The man stopped in the cereal section and made a thoughtful noise, leaning forward to pick up two boxes of cereal.  
“And here’s our last stop on this particular choo-choo-train. Last thing on your dad’s nutty ‘list’. Seriously, who makes a grocery LIST? Everyone knows you’re supposed to wait til you’re on an empty stomach, maybe eat a special gummy, then just go in there and go ham,” the man said.   
“Wree,” the baby said helpfully.   
“I KNOW! And he says ‘Oh, Wade, make sure you get something HEALTHY!’” he said, dropping his voice to mimic a deeper one. “Once again, that is not a thing. Everyone knows that. Everyone!” he sighed. “Guess it’s not his fault he’s from the Obscure Spacefuture where I guess people forgot that ALL cereal is just different types of sugary garbage designed to orally drop-kick you directly into the nearest dentist’s chair, but hey. If it makes my baby feel better.”  
The baby giggled and kicked her legs. 

“No, honey, not YOU!” the man said. “My large half-cyborg babyhusband!”  
The baby squealed a laugh and squirmed all over, slapping at his chest.  
“Your other dad IS comically huge, isn’t he? And he DOES need fuel for all those muscles...” He pulled two boxes down off the shelf, and shook them so their contents rustled.  
“Well, what do you think, O Most Precious Crotch-Nugget?” Wade asked. He waved one box to one side, then the other, so that she could see.

She kicked her legs and wiggled more when he showed her the box of Honey-Almond Crunch than she did of the LuciOs, and he snorted a little laugh and feigned incredulousness.  
“You little traitor! Come on, unhealthy breakfast crap was going to be Our Thing! Your other dad has dinner covered, I gotta have SOMETHING. And I am NOT a brunch bit—i mean bas—i mean, dammit, where are my random punctuation marks?” Wade said. “The writer’s seriously not going to bleep that out? She’s just gonna let me SWEAR in front of my infant. Right in front of the cereal, too!”

An elderly woman pushing a cart paused at the end of the aisle, saw he had a baby and gave him a dirty look before scuttling away, her cart rattling.

Wade sighed. “Ampersand-asterisk-at sign-exclamation point you too, lady,” he mumbled. Then, “Oh my god she seriously typed those out, didn’t she? Holy cheese, I wish I could check my boxes...”  
However, since this was the wrong media form for his beloved yellow boxes, he only bit his lip a little and shook his head.

But he didn’t have much time to be bummed.  
The entire grocery store swayed a little, the ground seeming to vibrate beneath his feet.  
From an aisle somewhere else, a woman gasped; two little boys who had been messing with the candy display on the endcap looked up at each other, with panicked faces.   
“What?” Wade said. “It’s just an earthquake. Probably not even a 2 or a 3.”  
The kids looked at him, then back at each other again, and then took off running.  
When nothing else happened and there was no earth-shattering kaboom, he shrugged and pushed his cart up towards the register.   
“Don’t you worry your fuzzy little head, Hope my little four-toothed wonder. S’just an earthquake. Maybe, if the Marvel writers can get their heads out of their butts, you can even meet a guy who can cause them! I mean, as long as he gets his powers back.” he paused, then added, “Unless he moved back to wherever the heck his boyfriend is from. Then we’re out of luck, ‘cause he’s an alien, and your dad’s spaceship is, as they say, befrickened to heck.” 

He patted her back a few times, listened thoughtfully to her burbles, and then said, “Yeah, me either. I’ll teach you how to swear properly when you have all your molars, don’t worry.” Then he brightened. “Hey! That’s it! I’ll be the Fun Parent! Let you sneak home late, teach you how to tag buildings, show you how to smoke a bong, maybe teach you how to make edibles and shoot a gun that will DEFINITELY be too big for you…whaddaya say?”

She stared at him a moment before breaking into a four-toothed grin so adorable that if Thanos had seen it, he’d have stopped to coo over her, and then Wade would have had time to cut of his hand, stupid Universal MacGuffin Glove and all. Fortunately Thanos was off fucking up a completely separate continuity, and Wade was eagerly waiting for the author to look away so he could pull out his phone and read everyone’s furious, despairing comments about it online. 

The baby balled one hand into a fist and tried to eat it, and all Wade’s thoughts about basking in others’ misery went out the proverbial window.   
“Yeah!” he said. “Fistbump!”  
(Fistbumps are hard to do when one of the people has a fist only a little larger than a very, very small apricot. But it was okay, even when she tried to eat his hand afterwards, too.)  
~

The cashier was the sort of disaffected twentysomething punk girl he’d always thought were hopelessly cool when he was a kid. She had a blue bob haircut, thick-rimmed glasses, purple lipstick, and a nametag that said EniD.  
Her smile was so insincere that it made him grin from ear to ear.  
“Um, sir?”  
“Yeah, I know, I know. You’re gonna ask if I’m Ryan Reynolds in a Fallout Ghoul mask. No, I’m not, but I’m flattered that you think I look enough like the Mayor to say so.” he said. Posititivty was the new order of the day, right? And if all those randos on the internet wanted to fuck—as well as make tender, sticky, post-apocalyptic love to—a guy who looked like a charred, warmed-over Bodies Exhibit gone rogue, he figured maybe people could learn to think he looked okay after all.

He hoped the author would do a crossover with the two of them. The Mayor Hancock was a fucking babe. 

“Actually I was going to tell you that we’re out of plastic bags. Is paper ok?”  
“Oh, no, my husband is a future hippie who doesn’t believe in that. Hang on,” he said, and then spent five miraculous, beautiful minutes watching the horrified faces of the bagger and the other cashier as he pulled out a bunch of tote bags with buff, muscular dudes in scanty clothes on them. Most of them were posed like vintage pinups.

The bagger—some poor kid who looked EXACTLY the way you expected a teenaged grocery store bagboy to look—goggled at him a moment.  
“Chippendales’ online store sale,” he said, with a smile.  
The cashier huffed twice and rolled her eyes, but the snicker got out of her anyway.

~

He made it all the way across the parking lot before he heard the rumbling again.  
And looked back over his shoulder to see some kind of giant stone creature come ploughing up from the sewer, groaning like a ship being twisted in half by a kaiju. The sound of crumbling concrete and asphalt, as well as a loud, harsh hissing noise of released steam or gases, erupted outwards with it.  
Someone—several dozen someones—screamed. 

“Big monster!” Wade breathed.  
The baby whimpered twice.  
“Oh, yeah honey, you’re totally right, we DID buy milk. Nope,” Wade muttered.   
Wade turned and hauled ass in the opposite direction. He only looked backwards once--maybe twice--and tried to convince himself that the thing that had just popped out of the sewer like a really big, really boulder-shaped gopher with what looked like twisted, rusting rebar sticking out of its back, was NOT carnivorous and hungry.

Mostly he held Hope’s head aganst his chest with his free hand and ran for their lives. 

This wasnt easy, since the ground seemed to have developed some new cracks and was also heaving and shuddering like the back of a puking frat boy, and he was trying to avoid dropping a) his infant daughter and b) his infant daughter’s excellent food choices-slash-the weekly groceries, and eventually he just said fuck it and--  
“Argh! Fuck! FUCK! Oh, I hope you don’t remember this when you start talking, your dad will kill me—BODYSLIDE BY TWO!”

\--and slid on the hall runner, the heel of his shoe catching it and dragging it as the forward momentum took them, and he ended up in an undignified but totally baby-safe sprawl on his back.

The baby had begun crying, big wet hiccups of sound, and Wade shifted onto his side slighty, shoved the grocery bags away with one hand to sit up hastily.  
He was deliberate, but quick, cupping the back of her head with one hand and feeling her little limbs with the other, murmuring a litany of soothing nothings as he did.  
“Shh, shh, hey, c’mon, you’re okay, you’re okay, the knockoff Thing can’t get you...”   
For a long while he sat there in the hall rocking back and forth, alternating mumbling to the baby and pressing kisses to her head.   
After awhile she quieted; he groped around him until he found her hat and snugged it back down over her head.   
“There, see?” he murmured. “Not a scratch on you.”  
He didn’t add that he would have probably stapled plastic explosives directly to the monster’s tongue if she HAD gotten even a tiny scratch. 

But crying seemed to have exhausted her; when he looked down again he was in time to see her take one final big breath—which hitched a few times, to his worry—before she quieted completely, her eyes slipping closed.

Wade lay back on the floor and waggled his feet back and forth, inwardly swearing and outwardly sweating. Where was Nate? Where was Al? Damn it, he needed to suit up and get out there! He needed—he needed a fucking rocking chair, because his INFANT DAUGHTER WAS ASLEEP ON HIS CHEST, and he had enough time to lie there resentfully staring at the ceiling and thinking baleful thoughts about the author forcing him to be mature, despite the fact that he KNEW he wouldn’t make any other choice.  
Sitters were too damn expensive, and people were super fucking shady.   
He was still like that when his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he had to use a Special Ninja Butt Trick to wiggle it free without waking the baby.

“Wade!” Nathan’s voice, deep and concerned, and so loud that Wade fumbled the phone befor ehastily lowering the volume.  
“Nate, baby! Heeey! So, um, me an’ Hope got the groceries--”  
“Where are—what?”  
“Yeah, and apparently you somehow managed to brainwash her into wanting Old People Nut Bran for breakfast, which is, like, a SIN or something, but that’s okay, because I decided--”  
“Are you safe?”   
Wade sighed. “Yeah, duh! We’re at home! And stop yelling, she’s down for her nap.”  
He FELT Nate’s sigh as much as he heard it—relieved, annoyed, and somehow fond.   
“Stay where you are. I’m coming right now,” Nate said.  
Wade didn’t get a chance to say anything before Nate said the magic words, and then suddeny he was there, backlit by the glass-paned door like some kind of buff cyborg saint in a blue henley and dark jeans. The whoosh of displaced air rustled the canvas tote bags and the plastic veggie bags inside them very dramatically, which at this point was like putting a Maraschino cherry on a massive slice of cake. His eye was flashing a brilliant blue today, very complementary to the entire look. 

“Do you match your eye to your outfits, or your moods? And have you told me this? The author wants to know.”  
“Wade?!” he asked, his voice climbing in alarm when he saw him lying there.  
Wade raised one arm to make an OK sign.  
“Just so you know,” he said, as Nate knelt beside him, “I TOTALLY woud have rolled over and struck a Sexy Pose, but, you know, Baby. Kinda sorta super gross. Also it would wake her up, and all of those books said they need to sleep for healthy brain development, and we don’t want a little ME running around here, so--”  
Nate’s concerned face had creased into a fond, exasperated smile. He leaned over Wade and kissed his forehead, knocking his already-loosened hat off completely.  
“The world wouldn’t end if she turns out to have ADHD like you,” Nate murmured.   
Wade’s face did a strange, complicated thing probably related to a feeling he couldn’t parse, but which was now stampeding around in his chest like an entire herd of wild horses, before his mouth caught up with him—or ran away from him again, rather—and he snorted and rolled his eyes.  
“Yeah, but it might if Rock Lobster has friends who come to smash some stuff. Come on, what are the details? You gotta take her, I gotta get back out there!”  
“It’s been handled,” Nate said gently.   
“What the f—fu...fun? Yeah, that’s a good save, let’s go with that one. I haven’t been swearing around our infant child at all, you can’t prove anything, and if the writer gives you some exposition, I gotta tell you, she’s a compulsive liar.”  
Now Nate rolled his eyes, too. “Don’t cuss around her, Wade, come on. We’ve talked about this.”  
“i know, I know--”  
“Then why--”  
“Oh, I’m sorry, did YOU just run for your life with a tiny semi-boneless human hanging from your chest, and almost two hundred dollars’ worth of overpriced organic groceries? No? Because I did! And now you’re telling me I missed a fight, too?”

But Nate was already rubbing the baby’s back, and he snorted a soft laugh at Wade’s indignation.  
“It looks like your mission was a success to me,” he said.   
And then Wade had to suck his lips and swallow the horrible happy-sadness that made his chest feel warm and too tight for a moment, before he got his shit together and said, “Well, yeah, if the quest was to turn the milk into yogurt, maybe.”  
“Wade!”  
“I couldn’t get up to put it in the fridge! She’d have woken up!”


	2. Bedtime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You wanted more absurdly self-indulgent domestic fluff, right? Right?

Nathan heard the soft mumbling from down the hall, right as he stepped out of the bathroom.  
Hair bristling everywhere from where he’d dried it, and with water still creeping in little rivulets down his back and sides and legs, he adjusted the towel around his waist and took a satisfied breath of the cooler air outside the bathroom.

Hope’s presence was a comforting little bubble of vague, cute colors and shapes, off in that same direction as the wild tangle of Wade’s; and outside, muted by distance and sheer number, was everyone else. Their consciousnesses crashed and ebbed like a multicolored tide, a river of images and words and sounds that reached him, here, only as echoes. He felt them the way you feel the tide at the beach, when you stand with your toes barely at the water-line. 

But the soft mumbling continued.  
He slung his second towel around his shoulders and strode down the hall, reaching out with his telekinesis and pulling the bathroom door shut without looking backwards. 

At the hall’s end it opened into the master bedroom, and there was Wade, in remarkably ratty red sweatpants and the world’s saddest, most broken-down t-shirt. There was an ancient, faded kebab restaurant logo on it.  
As he grew closer, the shifting mental noise-collage of Wade’s thoughts grew—not louder, but bigger, like walking closer to an abstract painting you can still only see through frosted glass.

Wade was lying on their bed, curled on his side. He was supporting himself on one elbow, with every pillow on the bed made into a wall opposite him: Nate realized he’d laid Hope down there.  
Noticing that he’d put himself between her and the door made Nate feel a welling of affection, only dampened by the knowledge that if anyone managed to get into the house at all, they’d have been dead before making it up the stairs.  
Early on they’d decided that it wouldn’t be a great idea to have guns near their baby, but Wade was a hyper-efficient one-man killing machine even when barehanded. 

One of whose hands was currently in a Big Bird puppet, he could see.  
Hope giggled at something, and Nathan smiled and came slowly and silently into the doorway.  
“...won’t win the big race, and then whatever shall we do? There will be no gysahl greens for anybody! What do we do?”  
Hope said, “Ababab. Hmmmuu?”  
“That’s right, it’s gonna be a battle to the finish line! The winner gets the medals, and the loser...well,” here Wade made Big Bird take a deep, exaggerated gulp, “Let’s just say the loser takes a one-way-trip to a chicken joint and comes back out batter-fried in a bucket...”  
“Aaaarh. Ababarrrarr.”  
“You’re right! The bar isn’t too high! We can do it!” Big Bird said. “If we don’t, they’ll serve US at a bar!”

Hope laughed, and she must have smacked at the toy, because with another exaggerated motion, Wade made it reel away.  
“Oh god! My eye! MY EYE! Now they’ll never let me into the chocobo stables! My career as a racer is over! My—look, Sweet Poop Monster o’ Mine, you gotta be nice to Big Bird. It’s been like 40 years and he still hasn’t shed his baby feathers. Come on, sweetheart, have some sympathy...”  
“Blaaaa!”

Nathan bit his lips to stop from chuckling, but he sat on the bed behind Wade, his thigh pressing gently against his husband’s back.  
“I’m pretty sure he’s actually a canary, Wade,” he said.  
He leaned over him and kissed the amused, faux-annoyed look off Wade’s face.  
“Bullshins he is! With a face like that?” Wade held the puppet up, having extricated it from Hope’s reaching hands. In another moment she’d pulled it down closer to herself and was busily trying to put its eye into her mouth. 

Nate watched them and felt the feedback loop of affection so strong it was like being under a heat lamp after coming in from the cold. Wade, of course, gave back mostly unreadable noise, but he also half-rolled onto his back and reached up with his now-free hand to pat at Nate’s towel-clad thigh. 

“It’s good that...” Nathan began, and then hesitated. He wanted to express so much, but he also wanted to express it perfectly. He took Wade’s hand in his and idly stroked his fingers up the scarred, mottled flesh of Wade’s forearm—snorting in mild amusement and playing along when Wade slid his hand into Nathan’s and did some complicated gesture he’d shown him and declared to be their Secret Husbands Handshake. Nathan remembered reminding him that they’d gotten married very publically, and that roughly half the X-Men had been there, including Logan (who Wade mercifully did NOT beg to ‘snikt him’, even if only because it would ruin his corsage). 

“It’s good that I look so cute in this shirt? Nate, I thought we were gonna work on honesty. This shirt is a piece of garbage, even I know that, but if I get rid of it, how will I remember my favorite kebab place’s phone number?” Wade said.  
While Hope was staring over at Nate, he wiggled his hand back into the puppet and made it squirm in her grip, pushing gently at her face as if struggling to get away. Hope laughed and kicked her feet. He could see she was wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles onesie today, because Wade’s secret favorite thing was picking out her clothes, and because Nate loved him and it wasn’t a secret that he found most of Wade’s quirks hilarious. This one included.

Nate snorted an amused laugh. “You could save it to your phone, like anybody else would.”  
“No way, and break character continuity? C’mon, babe, you know I can’t do that. I got people to...not...disappoint. What’s the word for that? Ms. Literature Nerd Author out there doesn’t remember it, if there is one.”  
“Miss who?”  
“Nothing, don’t worry, she’s getting tired of this gag anyway.” Wade shrugged expressively.  
Nathan could only roll his eyes, but his smile didn’t dim at all; he leaned back slightly against the bed’s headboard, allowing his head to loll back and watching the two of them together for a bit longer before he spoke again.

“I was going to say, it’s good that you talk to her so much. Good for development, speech acquisition...”  
“Bonding and all that, yeah, I know. Holy crease, what do you think people did before there WERE manuals? Just...freakin’...winged it?”  
“A lot of the time, yes,” Nate said softly.  
Wade was quiet for a long while, just moving the puppet for Hope to play with as she grew sleepier and her swipes and grabs at it got slower and slower, and eventually he just sort of wiggled it loose from her grip and tossed it into the bin at under the window, across from the bed. 

Wade sang, soft and low, after a moment:

“Hush little Stink-Butt, don’t say a word,  
your daddy’s gonna get you a mutated canary-bird.  
And if that canary-bird don’t sing,  
Your daddy’s gonna get you a diamond fairy ring

And if those fairies are evil or sly,  
Your daddy’s gonna poke ‘em in the eyes--”

Nate had to cover his mouth to stifle his laugh.  
“For pity’s sake, Wade!” he said, at last, nudging him with his thigh.  
Wade dissolved into giggles himself, but shot Nate a playful dirty look. “Excuse you, rude! I was making promises! you’re in charge of getting the bird and the diamond ring, by the way. I call elf eye-gouging duty--”

Nate sighed and nudged him again, and Wade snickered. Then suddenly he tensed all over.  
“Oh—ohh—ohhh! There it goes! Gentlemen, we have LIFTOFF! Destination: the Land of Nod!” Wade said. His voice was barely above a whisper, and Nate’s smothered laugh shook the whole bed.  
Hope had finally fallen asleep, one little fist under her chin and the other up beside her ear. 

A little while later, when they had her settled in her crib beside their bed, they stood leaning against each other and looking in at her, Wade with one of her little hands between his forefinger and thumb.  
“Okay, so, she’s sleeping, so the no-cussing rule is lifted. One. And two: holy shit, I hope we’re doing this right. I mean, look at me, I can only kind of stay on-script for a lullabye, I can’t even...” he paused. 

A minute shudder ran through him, and his shoulders drew tense.  
Nathan put his hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “What is it?”  
“I don’t know. Do you ever just suddenly realize you have NO fucking clue what you’re doing, like suddenly the real magnitude of your actions catches up with you and you realize you aren’t just defusing a bomb or something you can grow back from, it’s another tiny helpless person’s life, and do you REALLY realize that any stupid shit you do could land them in therapy forever, or make them never want to speak to you again, or...” he trailed off, drawing in a huge breath after the outburst. 

Still not glancing over at Nate, he continued, “My mom...” he sighed, put Hope’s hand down as gently as if it were a butterfly, and then clenched his hand on the crib railing so hard it creaked. “She. Okay, let’s skip all the painful exposition and just say that she was great, and. But I remember the empty bottles, and then the hospitals and the pills, and. You know how everything is normal to kids? Everything is normal because your frame of reference is, like, fucking tiny, and you think everyone’s mom makes jokes about dying and coming back to haunt you, but like, lovingly. And my dad was a royal piece of shit, which I DO remember. Even mom’s jokes about it couldn’t make it any less shitty.” 

he held up one hand. “Knocked my knuckles bloody on a door once, waiting for him to come home. Only he didn’t. He just fucking left.”

Wade’s silence was almost arctic, his eyes traveling up to stare into the wall in front of him.  
“Wade? Where are you going? Can you come back to me?” Nate asked. He’d found it was no use to ask if he was all right, because someone in Wade’s condition was never really ‘all right’, but that his baseline was often tolerable or okay.

“Do you think being a fuck-up is hereditary? Like, are we gonna find out my grandma was a witch and I’ve got devil blood in me and then a demon with masculinity issues possesses me and makes me cut my own head off in front of her, and I traumatize her horribly?”  
Nate blinked a few times, but the details came back to him suddenly. He sighed. “That was just a movie, Wade. You could always just put your head back on your neck and heal. And I would be here to help get rid of anything that tried to invade your mind.”  
Then it was his turn to pause. “And we’ve fought demons before. They’re never as powerful as they seem in movies.”

Wade made a little choked laugh, startling when Hope shifted in her crib.  
When she didn’t wake, he relaxed—barely--and continued, “That’s not what I meant. Fiction, reality mirror, blah blah blah, can anyone...can you really get away from how you were raised? Jesus, are we all doomed to just keep fucking up each future generation until the Mad Max days, and then when we go exinct, the roaches will look at our ruins and shake their heads?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’d like to say that people are at least trying better now. Doing their best.”  
“The Spartans thought the same thing, and they’re not exactly known for having good parenting skills nowadays.”  
“We aren’t going to send her to a child military camp where they’ll starve her and force her to catch wild animals for sustenance, Wade,” Nathan said, with infinite patience.  
“You don’t know that,” Wade said, and the gulf of despair opened up before him, and he saw what Wade felt, for abrief, painful, stabbing instant. “You don’t know that some things people—regular people, not Kratos v.1—do to their kids, without even thinking about it.”  
Then the noise washed back in. 

Then Nate sighed, and glanced over out the window. The sky was ultramarine, violet, plum-colored in a gradient; the street-lights had just come on, and there was a breeze coming through the maple out front.  
“Do you think you would abandon her, the way your father abandoned you and your mother?”

Wade leveled him with a look. “I would literally cut off both my legs, every day, forever, with a spoon, instead of doing that.”  
Nate kissed his cheek. “Then you’re already a better father.”  
“Doesn’t take much. I’m serious, Nate, I just...you know I fuck up roughly seventy percent of shit I try to do. And I don’t—i don’t want to...” he shook his head. “Of course YOU’RE perfect, Mr. Future over here.”

Nate scoffed softy. “Don’t do that. No, I’m not.”  
“You sure, Mutant Jesus?”  
Nate narrowed his eyes at him and elbowed him gently. “Don’t be an ass, Wade. Stop trying to needle me when all I did was try to comfort you.”  
“All right, then, Mr. Future! --God, what a stupid nickname, I don’t care what she does, I’m not calling you that anymore—look, how do you KNOW we’re raising her right?”

Nate slid one arm around his waist and kissed his temple, and then the crown of his head.  
“We’re doing as right as we know how. No starving or beating or being eviscerated by foxes. I think we’re doing okay.”

Wade fell silent again, but Nate felt him relax. Finally he said, “You’re doing okay, too. I know you don’t think it, or maybe you don’t realize, but more than one person has pointed out to me that you’re actually good with kids.”  
Then Wade giggled—actually giggled.  
“Teenagers. they’re not just kids, they’re underdeveloped mini-adults with hormone issues. Not the same.”  
“I still stand by what I said.”

Wade’s hand slid up his back, fingertips skimming the ridge where his living flesh met the TO mesh that divided his back in half like a parody of an anatomical model.  
There was no mistaking Wade’s smug little smirk. “Aww! Well, since you feel THAT way...” he glanced past him significantly, then looked over at the bed. “Want to try for number two?”

Nate wondered, not for the first time, if it was possible to have some sort of attack brought on by an excess of affection and from holding laughter in too much.  
Aloud, he said, “You know, if she wasn’t so young, I’d say yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> lmao sorry my dear friend, its 2:57 and i have proofread nothing
> 
> please leave comments if you would like to read more of this silliness!


End file.
